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Wednesday, July 12, 2017

All Grown Up, Edtech Is Ready to Show ‘Vanilla Ed’ How to Get the Job Done! Reflections on ISTE 2017

I’m back home
a few days now from San Antonio where I attended ISTE 2017 — the ever
bigger, ever more energetic and optimistic annual edtech mega
conference. This year even more than previously, the blend of high
enthusiasm, collective insight, and first looks at next-level
developments and offerings leaves me appreciatively well informed and
thoroughly inspired.

Attempting to accurately summarize this cross between a Burning Man
gathering of the tribe, and serious professional development for
educators — would be impossible. What I’ll share here, though, is my own
takeaway from four high-energy days of interfacing with the very best
in technology-supported education. I’m beyond bursting with ah-ha’s that reinforce my confidence in the future of teaching and learning. What a great time it is to be involved in education—assuming one’s mind is open to the possibilities presenting themselves just now!

It’s a fluid and fertile field to be involved in, and there is so much growth on the near horizon.

Let me mention up front that I’ve been in the edtech field for well
over two decades and in the general field of education longer than that.
This was the 20th consecutive ISTE conference I’ve attended.
I want to state emphatically that it seems to me that this year’s
conference marked the field actually having achieved the deep shift many
of us have been awaiting for a long time. I saw evidence throughout the
conference that edtech is no longer a niche area of the field of
education, it is education; it is the most important thing going on in education.

I’m an ex-teacher, ex-instructional supervisor, and ex big-city
school system director of Instructional Technology. Looking through
those lenses, truly I can hardly see any best instructional practices
that don’t use technology to present students with the very
best learning experience possible! In short, edtech is the most
impactful, and most important facet of contemporary teaching, learning,
and school administration—and it is about to show what I’ll call
“Vanilla Ed” (education that’s still going on its uninformed, oblivious,
paper-driven way) how to get the job done, how to finally realize its
own goals and reforms that, despite much discussion, have been elusive
until now — through the application of technology. I found it
abundantly evident throughout the ISTE 2017 experience, that while no
formal announcement has been made, that shift has finally and thoroughly
happened!

Okay, having gotten that off my chest—here’s some of what I saw and experienced that I’d really like to share.

Telling the Story
I ran into Richard Culatta a number of times, once almost literally
as he whizzed past me while cruising around one of the conference poster
session areas on a Segway. Mr. Culatta is the new CEO of ISTE
and he brings great enthusiasm and youthful style to the job, something
that added to the optimism one couldn’t help but feel at the
conference. He spoke at the opening keynote and again to the smaller
group assembled in the annual ISTE Board Member’s lunch where a number
of kindred spirit ISTE members received the much coveted “Making IT Happen Jacket”
award for outstanding work in the field (both Richard and I are former
recipients). At the breakfast he hosted for media the next morning, he
revealed his thinking about ISTE and its future. He spoke about
increasing ISTE’s reach, how we need to impact and engage many more
educators as we move forward. Among other points he made, three
resonated particularly strongly for me: 1) that much needs to be done by
ISTE in the area of Higher Education, in its role in teacher
preparation, especially; 2) that the field needs to stress educator
leadership, through things like ISTE’s PLNs (Professional Learning
Networks), and 3) he expressed admiration for ISTE’s publications and
stressed how that what’s needed is ‘telling the story’ of educational
change through technology, something that I believe Thomas Friedman
alluded to in his ground breaking book The World is Flat,
opining that one of the new, crucial roles people must play in the
emerging world is that of ‘Explainer’ and to that end, I’ll do my best
with this article, Richard.

HappySpeaking of Inspiration, I received a massive hit of it from Apple, a
company that I don’t recall seeing at an ISTE Conference for years. Yes,
they continued to be an important part of edtech all that time, no
doubt, but it was so good to see them at the conference again—and with
such sparkle! Perhaps the best part of this for me was that I didn’t see
them releasing any new, paradigm setting devices, but rather, deepening
our planetary body of best instructional practice with other sorts of
refinements. As a longtime advocate of LEGO’s Student Robotics
resources, I was pleased to see Apple’s Swift programming language
applied to program them, something that I expect will strongly enrich
efforts to teach coding and applications of it. I also got to see this
approach to coding applied to a Parrot drone, making my alter ego (a
dormant, twelve-year-old science nerd who hides inside of me), stand up
and cheer.

But what truly got my pulse racing was the Apple group session I
attended titled “The Power of Music for Learning: GarageBand and
Tuniversity” in which, after not having worked with Garage Band for far
too long (my bad, my bad, my most unfortunate bad!), I got a fresh look
at this resource for making and recording your own music through a very
engaging and easy to use graphic interface. This was part of an
introduction to some of the magic of Tuniversity, a new education
company co-founded by Pharrell Williams, dedicated to reinvigorating
music education using iPad.

As everyone on the planet knows, Pharrell Williams is the composer,
singer, and music video star of the Grammy Award winning song, ”Happy” — which coincidentally is the basis of Tuniversity’s first book, “Learn Pharrell Williams’ Happy A Modern Method for Writing, Recording, and Producing Music” — an instructional resource that uses audio, video, and technology tools (including Garage Band) to analyze the song “Happy” — helping students learn creative skills of music making and production.
What come across impactfully, is that this is an effort to
re-establish Music (and by extension, Arts) Education as a vibrant,
high-engagement, tech-driven phenomenon to recapture the hearts and
minds of young people everywhere. It certainly captured mine! I actually
started out my career in education (please don’t ask me how long ago!)
as an arts educator, and I could see from the get-go that this is the
real deal, one of those rare chemistry blends of the right insight,
personalities, and resources to actually bring something crucial back
from the brink.

For me the centerpiece was a video recorded especially for this
session, in which Pharrell speaks directly to educators, explaining his
passion for music and commitment to what he feels is a new sort of
education in which students are brought into the process of making music
with digital resources. Afterward, I briefly chatted one-on-one with
Brent, one of the book’s authors and Pharrell’s guitarist for many
years. I was much impressed with the level of expertise and commitment
that he and his partners bring to this effort. I pretty much floated out
of the room.

MicrosoftMicrosoft, too, had a great presence at the conference. Both upstairs
in its designated area for giving demos and PD sessions, many of which
were well attended with folks lining up and waiting to get a look at
Microsoft’s ideas and offerings. Also, out on the exhibit floor, where
some very exciting Microsoft Partners APPs were on view, a variety of
ways to “Spark Creativity” — including different approaches to student
robotics — vied for attention. One that caught mine was the Virtual Robotics Toolkit.
Throughout the conference, Microsoft had a great deal to share with
today’s forward thinking educators; a few session examples were:
Minecraft Education Edition with Code Builder; Office 365 for Authentic
Assessments; and Creating engaging projects and presentations with Sway
(MS presentation resource).
Richard Langford, a Microsoft Senior Education and Solutions
Specialist at the conference, graciously gave me a bit of a Microsoft
education overview, sitting with me for a lengthy conversation in which
he fully grabbed my attention.

Beyond any of the many things that MS does to contribute to the
educational landscape and possibilities horizon, he gave me some great “ah ha’s”
that I left the conference with. By that, I mean an understanding of
how one of the really big providers sees things these days; how its
posture and culture have been shaped by, and is shaping — the
landscape of edtech. He explained that today’s company reflects a change
in which MS has come to see education as an inseparable, major element
in its vision and mission — and keeps it absolutely up front in all
the things it does. Products are conceived with education in mind, not
adapted for education later on. Further, many resources are developed
with school needs paramount in consideration, so that resources like
OneNote can interface with the Student Information Systems when schools
use popular platforms like Schoology or Edmodo. The experience feels to
local level educators as seamless and easy; no disincentives, like
labor-intensive class setups.

Saving time for teachers, Richard related, is a very high priority for Microsoft and it’s a way that MS is making a difference: “We value teachers. We’re not focused on replacing teachers in any way. What we want to do is empower them to teach” —and from where I view it all, I think that’s a great position to take.

One of the things I took away from this conversation and others I had
with representatives from the big providers is that they seem to be
focused on maintaining their own vision of what the world of education
needs. It’s not a situation of who will compete best in an already
defined and limited field of possibilities. While a degree of
competition is inevitable, what I’m seeing more of is each provider
bringing its own special body of offerings to a malleable market. I
particularly appreciate this because, where we’ve been headed, and where
I think we’ve already landed, is a new world in which the universe of
personalized resources and approaches to use them is ever changing. The
world of standardized, hardcopy resources in which consumers had just a
handful of viable choices is receding into the far distance. As was
explained to me, if the focus is on what teachers want to do to provide
students with a great learning experience, then there will be
opportunities for providers who cater to that. As Richard put it to me,
he and his colleagues frown on “Bake Offs” — in other words, situations
in which everyone comes to the market with more or less the same
cupcakes or cookies (my analogy), leaving the customer to compare price
or size or minor flavor enhancements. We are looking at a market, I
think, in which there are more and better choices, much more variety and
personalization through response to district, school, teacher, and
student needs. Further, astute providers seem to have come to the
conclusion that today’s winner may be tomorrow’s partner; it’s a fluid
and fertile field to be involved in, and there is so much growth on the
near horizon.

Googling Along
At the very large and strategically placed Google exhibit, I decided
to sit down among a group of teachers who finally had a chance to test
drive Google Classroom
and see for themselves what all the buzz is about this resource,
described by GOOGLE as “mission control” for teachers, connecting the
class and enabling them to track student progress. The effect on those
next to me struggling to wrap their already overstuffed minds around
this “digital learning platform” was impressive. I bore witness to their
maiden voyage at the helm of a popular solution to that great problem
for teachers to have: how to manage students, as they guide them through
a plethora of assignments, content, tools and resources. Sparks were
flying faster than fingers on keyboards as the realization that the
overwhelm of herding digital cats could now be easily side stepped on
the way to far better teaching and learning. It was another of the many
glimpses I got into just how sophisticated edtech has become — how ready it is to transform education.

Surrounding the GOOGLE Classroom area were small tables at which
various partners’ resources were highlighted. I stopped by the table
manned by Piotr Sliwinski (my apologies, Piotr, for not having a Polish
keyboard to do justice to your name). Like offerings at the other
tables, this one featured an exciting resource titled, Explain Everything(offered through the Google Creative Bundle for Chromebooks),
a versatile interactive whiteboard app that can be used for sharing
knowledge, building understanding, personal productivity, and much more.
As the author of a recent ISTE book on Student Creativity,
I quickly recognized here a tool to facilitate and spark thinking and
expression as well as to capture, communicate, and collaborate around
it. I very much hope that today’s kids have a glimmer of understanding
about how the possibilities of what one can do in school have been
expanded by technology. Well, actually, as someone who was a classroom
teacher for nearly two decades, I won’t get my hopes on that one up too
far—just let them use all this, and make some magic with it!

Gamify the Classroom
I reconnected with Shawn and Devin (Young) of Classcraft, an
increasingly popular “gamification” platform. Classcraft is one of a
small group of absolutely paradigm-shifting resources that young
educators are adopting passionately. Far beyond simply introducing
gaming into one’s teaching practice, it enables teachers and students to
literally “Gamify the Classroom,” and I love the audacity of
deconstructing the structure of traditional school organization for
instruction and recontextualizing it this way to render a highly
relevant, re-conceived school experience that is easy to view as an
improvement.

As I chatted with Devin, one of the two brothers who conceived and
developed Classcraft, he explained to me that much of his attention
these days is on further developing and refining those aspects of the
resource that enable teachers to easily access Classcraft in concert
with their standard LMS or digital learning platform; to have student
performance information that it generates be part and parcel of a
teacher’s overall student data use, and for all of this to work across
platforms in a seamless, interoperable, and above all, highly
user-friendly context and experience.

Today’s educators are well equipped to provide a compelling and effective learning experience to their students.

Such work makes resources like Classcraft suitable and appealing for
big providers like Microsoft and Google, increasing the body of
resources they can stand behind and offer to tech-consuming educators,
without having to develop or acquire them directly. And from the
perspective of those small developers, often young people who are
passionate and astute about the ways technology-driven resources can
transform education, this approach allows them independence while
assuring much greater reach and access to the audience they want to
address. Looks like edtech has entered another favorable period of
win-win-win!

My Own Panel
Heading up ISTE’s Literacy Education PLN (Professional Learning
Network), I, and my network colleagues, had the privilege of inviting
some of the very most promising digital resource providers, currently,
to join us in a panel presentation to explain their offerings to ISTE
members. As always, this session was full and much appreciated. Small
wonder as what we put together was truly a powerhouse group of
resources. We fortunately managed to present the following groups in one
setting in just one short hour of concentrated focus on how technology
is positively transforming what we see as one of the very most important
missions of edtech, Literacy Learning. With this small
aggregation of resources, much of it free, today’s educators are well
equipped to provide a compelling and effective learning experience to
their students. The body of resources our group highlighted this year
included (I’ll let quotes from their respective websites speak for
them):Newsela – “When textbooks dream,
they dream of Newsela – Join our community of 1,300,000 Newsela
educators and counting.” This resource provides relevant, up to date
content for students.Listenwise – “The Power of Listening – Listening comprehension advances literacy and learning for all students.”Quizlet– “Simple tools for
learning anything. Search millions of study sets or create your own.
Improve your grades by studying with flashcards, games and more.”Discovery Education–
“Transforming Teaching & Learning. We ignite student curiosity and
inspire educators to reimagine learning with award-winning digital
content and powerful professional development.”
I managed to sit with Stephen Wakefield of Discovery Education later
to discuss the powerful content that Discovery continues to provide
through both its Techbook (think textbook reconceived as a digital
resource for 21st Century learning) and Streaming video
collection. Just as I appreciate Tuniversity coming from the world of
entertainment to develop classroom resources, the same can be said about
Discovery (is it Shark Week, yet?) being the origin of Discovery
Education’s high motivation content for learners. We’ve fully arrived at
a point in education’s evolution that reflects the new reality of the
availability of highly motivating, “just right” content … in abundance.
And it’s provided in ways that make distributing it to students easy and
learner-friendly. Discovery offers both the digital send-up of the
classic textbook, and a powerful collection of videos as it demonstrates
to today’s learners just how interesting content can be.

Technology is About Reading BooksI stopped by the Follett booth to see what they were offering this year.
Glad I did. Any notion that technology is doing anything other than
encouraging and supporting kids to fully understand and commit to the
richness of books needs (IMHO) to be tempered by a look at Follett’s Lightbox,
a fully interactive, multidimensional, supplemental solution for pre
K-12 educators looking to improve engagement and literacy skills.
There’s a great deal here, including classic novels and interactive
Lightbox titles, as well as activities and assessments. But while
students using this resource are very likely to learn to understand and
value books, they are doing so in a truly 21st-century way.
The digital interface they are presented with offers them ways to work
with books that allow them to focus on things that they need and
appreciate as they do so; direct access to things like audio, video, web
links, slideshows, maps, and on and on. This, I think, is a rich,
up-to-date, relevant approach to literacy instruction.

Hey, I’m always one to boldly go looking for some excitement. And out there on one of the leading edges of edtech, I found some.

The Leading Edge
Hey, I’m always one to boldly go looking for some excitement. And out
there on one of the leading edges of edtech, I found some when I spoke
with the folks from Voyager Sopris who gave me a view of what’s
happening on the edtech event horizon, the already-here future of
education. This is the realm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine
Learning applied to teaching and learning.

Seriously, I enjoyed wrapping my mind around this group’s ‘Velocity‘
solution, one of the more sophisticated applications of the power of
technology to the eternal work and joy of teaching and learning I’ve
seen.

Is edtech ready to redefine what’s possible in education? I don’t
think that there’s any hyperbole in citing Velocity as proof that what
was inconceivable a short while ago is already in implementation.
In Velocity we see a literacy intervention resource that is
‘adaptive’ in a sense of that word that I feel is authentic and genuine.
At the heart of Velocity is an engine that learns how the student
learns best. One result of its work is the creation of the content
needed by the student to learn, content created on the fly as the
student uses it. However, built into the student experience is reward
for productive struggle, something that rings true to me. Teachers are
informed in real time where each student is at in the learning process.
Throughout the conference, I heard repeated the concept of personalized learning.
And here, it seems to me, we have an item that has taken aim at
offering the sort of personalized learning that our struggling learners
need badly; in literacy learning, a very crucial area of the curriculum,
at that.
Velocity appears to be an important step forward, adaptive learning
that doesn’t call up items from fixed, predicted paths, but rather
accounts for thousands of variables and that works with the student to
produce the unique way forward through the learning experience that he
or she needs. Scaffolds and supports, hints and multi sensory variations
are provided to students who are engaged through their various
dimensions as learners.

On the Exhibition Floor
My initial disappointment at the state of the exhibition floor soon
mellowed into appreciation for what I take as a clear indication of
growth of the field. By that I mean that as someone who came to edtech
from being a classroom teacher, I always look for instructional
resources when I venture out into the exhibit and this year the first
thing that struck me was the amount of hardware and infrastructure
oriented items on display. And while I don’t feel the need to
investigate those much, the sheer number does show that there will be
much more in our schools soon on which students and teachers will run
all of the instructional stuff that accompanied the equipment I saw. By
the way, I was fascinated to see Chinese companies in the house. I spoke
with Mr. Chen, of Shenshen Yue Jiang Technology, provider of DOBOT
education materials, which impressed me as combining good features of
robotics, 3D printers, and maker resources—good stuff!
As I ricocheted from one booth to the next, I found some items that I’d like to share:

Pie Top – Pie Top
was one bit of hardware that intoxicated me with that variety of EdTech
Caffeine for the tired school that I’ve come to rely on ISTE for. Pie
Top is a kit-oriented, build-your-own connected device item for kids
that makes use of the now near ubiquitous Raspberry Pie processor at its
core. The coolness factor on this one is undeniable.Tiggly – Tiggly
is one of those hybrid items that cross over between educational toy
and full-press instructional resource. Kids pick up real, palpable
shapes (think instructional manipulates of the past) that, when pressed
to the screen of an iPad (or a Chrome, Android, or Kindle device),
activate the digital magic inside. Young learners become immersed in a
rich learning environment in which the real world interacts with the
digital world, both coalescing into a learning experience guaranteed to
engage and provide stimulation and cognitive supports as they play,
work, and learn their way to literacy and numeracy. In my mind, a good
example of how technology-supported learning has got to offer something
more and better than what came before.FreshGrade – FreshGrade
is a digital portfolio and grade book resource guaranteed to make
portfolio/authentic assessment easy. Kids share their work through a
digital portfolio—one more example of how technology, the great enabler,
has made a long-held goal of progressive educators, portfolio
assessment, doable and within the grasp of the average teacher and
class.Parrot – So great to see Parrot drones join robotics and other related resources to provide a context and platform for coding and STEM efforts.

Start Up Pavilion
Always inspiring are the offerings at the Startup Pavilion where, at
little mini booths, new hopefuls entering the field share their vision
for how they are expanding the envelope of edtech possibilities. There
were many there this year. I visited quickly with a few notables:BITSBOX: coding projects for kids. With Bitsbox,
children as young as six years old learn to program by creating fun
apps that work on computers and gadgets like iPads and Android tablets.
The Bitsbox.com website provides each child with a virtual tablet and a
place to type their code. The experience starts with lots of guidance,
first showing learners exactly what to type, then quickly encouraging
them to modify and expand their apps by typing in new commands.Video Collaboratory. Former dancer and choreographer Sybil Huskey was sitting there with her colleague Vikash Singh demoing the very interesting Video Collaboratory,
a web-based application designed for group collaboration around video
documents. Beyond simply viewing video, the Collaboratory is equipped to
allow students to mark up, analyze and discuss videos. As the old
saying goes, “Find a need and fill it!” and I think these folks have
done just that. Online learning gets richer all the time.Common Lit.CommonLit
delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy
development for students in grades 5-12. Resources are: flexible;
research-based; aligned to the Common Core State Standards; created by
teachers, for teachers. And oh, they are free!

Poster Sessions
While my head was wrapped firmly around the things mentioned above,
my heart was warmed, as it always is, in the playgrounds and poster
session areas where real educators and real students show what they do. A
few items that took me by the heart and wouldn’t let go were:Instituto Rosedal Lomas in Mexico City’s project.
Student Renata Susunaga showed me how the Physics students there
created a data analysis project in which they used Facebook as a data
gathering engine, later analyzing and representing findings in large
graphics. I thought appropriating a ubiquitous and data sensitive
resource like Facebook was clever and effective, just the sort of thing
today’s kids benefit from.Guiding Reluctant Teachers Through the Shallow End of the Technology Pool.
Presenter Melissa Henning showed those of us gathered around her
presentation table a raft of simple ‘win over those reluctant teachers’
activities, all of which use free and hyper user-friendly, web-based
resources. Just the right touch for the difficult, but essential, job
this approach takes aim at.Misty Simpson and Wendy Boatright’s session, “Cross-Curricular Centers to promote Creativity and Engagement”
in which they explain why Learning centers are a great way to inspire
and engage students to be creative with technology; all while meeting
the standards and learning objectives. They showed how they integrate
Social Studies and ELA centers with vocabulary, journals, digital
stories, brochures and more, employing the powerful WIXIE resource from Tech4Learning.
And, of course, there was more—so much more!

One of the wonderful things about attending the conference
is the near certainty that you will cross paths with respected
colleagues and friends who’ve traveled this path with you over the
years.

Ubiquitous, Necessary, and Invisible
One of the wonderful things about attending the conference is the
near certainty that you will cross paths with respected colleagues and
friends who’ve traveled this path with you over the years. I was happy
to spend a little time with Chris Lehman,
founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy, a nationally
prominent school located in Philadelphia and a noted education
innovator. I asked him for an impression of the conference and he
explained that he was excited by how many people he heard were really
talking about school reform and educational change, not just about
specific technology items.

Reacting to my reflection that technology now dominates best
practices in teaching and learning, Chris reminded me of the old truism
that “school technology should be like oxygen; ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” Astute, as was his thought that we don’t need to be talking about technology so much; it just needs to be part of what we do.

This I take as more confirmation that the shift from the traditional
classroom to digital learning environment is already well in effect.
While far from complete, there is already much ubiquity in technology in
our schools, and the presence of so many vendors in the exhibition hall
indicates that this is increasing rapidly. And now, I agree, it’s time
to stop talking about the digital platform for learning that’s been a
quarter century plus in the making, and take further charge of it and
further use it for the transformation in education that we now have the power to bring about.

Edtech is like the kid who’s all grown up, but still sees himself as
‘Junior.’ And, of course, there is much more growing and maturing to be
done—but let’s take a good look in the mirror, shall we? Edtech is
what’s happening in education. It’s education’s strongest suit, the
only one that can truly transform ‘Vanilla Ed’ to better prepare today’s
kids for the era they are learning to learn in, and in which they will
live and prosper. This is such an important moment and I can’t think of
any place more appropriate for it to have declared and revealed itself
than at ISTE 2017. I’m proud to be a member!
—In addition to being a member of ISTE, Mark Gura is an Advisory
Board Member and Contributing Editor of EdTech Digest and the author of
the recently released book, Make, Learn, Succeed: Building a Culture of Creativity in Your School published
by ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). Mark will
be serving as a judge for the 2018 EdTech Awards—recognizing edtech’s
best and brightest innovators, leaders, and trendsetters (click here for an entry form).